Sundar Pichai on AI, the future of search, and what’s happening to the web

Today, I’m talking with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, in a conversation we recorded just after the Google I/O developer conference. This is the fifth year Sundar and I have sat down after I/O, and it’s become one of my favorite Decoder traditions. There’s always a lot of news at I/O, and this year was no exception — Google has powerful new Gemini models, it’s putting AI agents in everything, and it’s making huge changes to Search on both the web and YouTube that will once again reshape the information ecosystem. That’s a lot to talk about, and Sundar and I got into all of it. But I also realized it’s been a long time since I’d asked Sundar the Decoder questions about structure and decision making, so I started there. You’ll hear Sundar say he realized he needed to rethink how Google worked a few years ago in response to ChatGPT, and he made a lot of executive changes and big decisions to get the company in a more aggressive posture. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. Of course, we also talked about all those search changes, and how it seems obvious th…